It's too late for this first solution to your question, but, if you are running WinXP Pro, you can set a policy to allow the access of all drives and directories from within the Recovery Console. That policy has to be set BEFORE you run into the problem, though.
It sounds as though you may be out of luck insofar as using Recovery Console to fix your problem. Before bothering to read any of the following please realize that this is a generalized suggestion based on the little information you have given us. You haven't really described exactly what has happened to your system, nor have you given us much information about its history. If your problem is caused by frank electro-mechanical failure of the drive or its controller or by malware then it is entirely possible that none of the following will be helpful. In point of fact there are cases where continuing to mess with the disk in any way at all can reduce your chances of recovering the data. If you need a data recovery service, then find one and use it. It will cost you an arm and a leg, but it can be worth the cost if you're talking about important data that cannot be replaced any other way.
So the data is at least somewhat important to you, right? Okay, then take that drive out of the machine it is in and place it as a slave drive in another WinXP system (one with a properly working OS). Try to back up your data from within that other OS installation by taking ownership and giving yourself permissions to access the directory structures that contain the data. (I'm assuming NTFS format here. No access control lists to worry about on FAT32, but that isn't a very good file system, either.) If the WinXP installation in the other machine says that your file system on your drive is hosed then back off and decide whether you can afford to lose the data by performing a correction. If you tell WinXP to fix file system errors on your drive you may make your data unrecoverable by anyone other than a data recovery facility. (Alternative -- data recovery software you use on your own.)
If that isn't feasible, and assuming your drive is electro-mechanically oaky, you can do a PARALLEL INSTALL of the operating system. (You install to the same partition but choose a different directory than the default \Windows directory.) That new installation will automatically be set up as the default boot OS installation so that when you reboot you should have acceess to your old files. (You will probably have to take ownership of them before you can read them.)
If your data was encrypted using EFS under the old OS installation then I hope you took the proper precautions ahead of time for designating alternate recovery agents.
Oh, and now the obligatory sermon -- if data is important to you, back it up. Not on the same drive. Not on another drive on the same machine. Maybe not even on another drive on a different machine. When I say backup I mean regular full backups to durable removeable media, kept in a safe place with at least some copies kept in a remote location. Both rotating and permanent. If the data is important.
Good luck.
- prosaic
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